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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Yorkshire Move part 6 - the house

So, it's Friday, we're in Pocklington, have just seen not one but two perfect schools and are, to be honest, feeling pretty bloody smug about it all.Time to really burst our bubble by looking for houses.

Remember, last time we looked for houses, we'd been looking around York's suburbs and had an awful time of it.Nice area = too expensiveAffordable = wouldn't touch it with a bloody barge pole.

So this time, looking on Right Move, we'd concentrated on the outlying commuter towns and villages and had come away with 4 properties that we thought looked pretty good.

The first one of these was booked in on the Friday late afternoon. Tired and ready to crash at the hotel, we pulled up into Sutton on Derwent, a village a couple of miles from Pocklington.And immediately, we knew this one wasn't what we were looking for.That feeling again.Unfortunately, the woman was already coming out to us so plastering our fake smiles on as best we could we entered the house.

Although I haven't watched as many of those annoying house programmes as I could have done, I'm pretty sure that pretty high on the list is tidy up, clean away your 4 boys football gear and try to get rid of the smells associated with 4 adolescents.I'm also pretty sure that flushing the toilet is up there on the must dos as well.Apart from that it was okay, good layout, nice size rooms, but just too much bloody work and not for us.

That night at the hotel Louise and Molly settled down for the night and I went out for what must have seemed, to the casual observer, a 2 hour kerb crawl around Pocklington at night. We figured if the town had a seedier, nastier side, night-time on a Friday was the best time to see it.Nothing. No gangs of kids, no noise, just a few folks going to a fro the couple of pubs in the centre of town. Lovely.

The following day we had 3 houses lined up, all in Pocklington.

First one was a recently re-developed 3 storey town-house. Beautifully done. But a bit pointless really. Molly could have had the top floor bedroom, but we were left wondering what exactly shed do with a full wet room, which is what the developer had done to the other room on the 2nd floor. Maybe not for us.

Onto the next. This was simply a repeat of the house we saw on the Friday. Dirty, messy, badly decorated, badly laid out, badly repaired. Just a no the minute we got through the door.

Final house.This was the one Louise in particular had been looking forward to all day.4 bedroom town-house, very new, garage, nice garden and from the photos on the particulars, it looked like it had been very nicely presented.We got through the door into the lounge and the feeling kicked in again.If we could, we'd probably have bought it there and then, without even looking at the rest of the place.Lounge was perfect, Kitchen perfect, downstairs loo perfect, garage (taking the place of the cellar for storage I suppose), garden same size as we have now, master bedroom perfect, spare bedroom perfect (Louise plans to have lots of people up), Molly's room more than perfect (18 bloody feet long - more than enough space for her to have bedroom and playroom in one) & the small bedroom for my office is only just smaller than the one I'm sitting in now.Perfect.

Molly sat and played with the couple's youngest daughter - who, coincidentally, had just started reception at the school Molly was going to be starting very soon. (Although Louise points out that it isn't co-incidence, it's fate. pah)We stood in the office and worked out how we were going to get the money together in a hurry to put an offer in on the house we wanted.It just felt exactly right.

We came back downstairs and tried to act interested but not too interested, whilst inwardly both desperately wanting to just buy the damn place there and then.

2 hours later we're in a coffee bar, still feeling elated but were soon brought crashing down to Earth by the news from Halifax that we couldn't get a separate mortgage on the new one without selling ours first, no matter how much we had as deposit.Arse.